By Sunidhi

With an aim to upskill India's youth and improve their employability by encouraging them to pursue internships, Internshala, the recruitment and training platform organised the 'Internship Day – 2021'on 2th august 2021. During the online event, colleges from across India were felicitated with awards for their exceptional efforts to improve the employability of their students by encouraging them to pursue internships during the summer months from May to August.

In a bid to encourage academic institutions to take significant steps to raise awareness among their students about the role of internships in preparing them for the professional world, Internship Day was launched in 2018. It is a national event hosted every year on 25th August by Internshala to promote the internship culture in colleges. It is a 4 months long event, where Internshala provides consistent summer internship support to all the colleges across India and honour the top colleges that made exceptional efforts towards building a meaningful internship culture.

This year, over 1,500 educational institutions participated in this 4 months long journey and more than 67,300 students got benefitted through this initiative. Internshala also helped colleges through its 'Intern Skills Campaign', a sub initiative of Internship Day which emphasised the importance of learning and polishing new skills through internships. The campaign also provided relevant internship opportunities to the students of the participating colleges through a dedicated internship page on the platform. The platform also helped colleges in guiding their students on how they can register for free on Internshala and how they can make good applications for internships.

Internshala also helped colleges through its 'Intern Skills Campaign', a sub initiative of Internship Day which emphasised the importance of learning and polishing new skills through internships. Photo by Brooke Cagle on Unsplash

Photo by Brooke Cagle on Unsplash

During the Internship Day event, 37 colleges from across the nation were honoured for their outstanding efforts in helping their students find internships thereby making them career-ready. The top-performing colleges included Paavai Engineering College, Chandigarh University, and Banaras Hindu University.

In addition to the felicitation of 37 colleges, as a part of another sub initiative, 'Internshala Grants', 12 colleges were granted with free of cost Internshala Trainings worth more than ₹6.5 lacs to help students learn in-demand industry skills. This initiative was launched with a belief that all of us, as a community, should relentlessly work towards the betterment of our students and help upskill them.

An open dialogue session was also organised during the event on the topic, 'optimising the journey from internships to employability' for the college fraternity. This session was aimed at empowering them with the best resources to make better training and placement strategies. During this session, the panellists discussed real-time problems faced by TPOs and shared tried and tested solutions appreciated by a lot of TPOs from tier 2 & 3 institutes. The panelists included Dr. Sunita Tank, founder of Leaders in Making; Dr. Shitalkumar Rawandale, dean of Placements at Pimpri Chinchwad Education Trust (PCET) & President of Maharashtra Association of TPOs and; Prof. Ashish Bhateja, Asst. Professor in the mechanical engineering department and faculty convenor for MHRD's Innovation Council.

Sarvesh Agrawal, the founder and CEO of Internshala, congratulated the winning institutions and said, "Internship Day is a celebration of the internship culture in India. For the past 10 years, our mission has been to connect the students of India with meaningful opportunities. Together with the colleges from across India and the support of companies who come forward to hire young talent, we have been able to help 5 lac+ students find internships every year. "

He added, "With the Covid-19 outbreak in 2020, there also came a lot of uncertainty around the future of students of India. In this trying situation, it was the dedication and selflessness of the teachers which helped the students in overcoming these challenges. For this, I express my immense gratitude and respect to all the colleges and the teachers for it was with their support only that we could help 67k+ students find internships in the past 4 months."

keywords: internships, internshala, Internshala Internship Day, India,students.